Consequences of Corruption for Political System Support: Evidence From a Brazilian Scandal
2025-05-14
How do corruption scandals affect mass support for democratic institutions? We leverage the surprise news of Brazil’s historic 2015 corruption scandal, which broke during Latinobarometer data collection, to assess the causal effects of scandals on political system support. From the corruption literature, we derive and test two hypotheses: (1) a conditional hypothesis in which the public rewards democratic institutions for uncovering corruption and punishes those institutions implicated in the scandal, and (2) a cynical hypothesis in which the public punishes democratic institutions as complicit or failing to prevent corruption. Our regression discontinuity analysis finds support for the cynical hypothesis. Being randomly sampled after the news of the scandal broke leads to a significant reduction in trust in institutions, whether they were involved in the scandal or not, in democratic values, and in support for democracy. We conclude with the implications of these findings for accountability and challenges to democracy.